I'm fairly open to eating a lot of things but admit this one is a tough hurdle for me. I watched others eat mopane worms in Zimbabwe but took a pass at trying it myself, even though some said "it tastes like coconut cream." I took their word on that one.
In Malawi, my dinners had what I thought was lots of cracked pepper until I realized a few meals later that my pepper was moving. It was not possible to brush off all of the ants (errr, black pepper) so my wife and I started to turn off our head lamps while eating and pretended that it really was pepper. But that was really my limit.
It may be the year of the bugs, but I still may take a pass this year.
“This year bug eating has become a trendy thing. The momentum is building,” says David George Gordon, who’s working on an update of his classic “Eat-a-bug Cookbook: 33 ways to cook grasshoppers, ants, water bugs, spiders, centipedes, and their kin.”Note from John: My two run-ins with bug gourmet were in the Brazilian Amazon and Oaxaca, Mexico. In the Amazon the locals tried to get me to eat squirming grubs the size of your thumb. I demurred. I searched on YouTube and these look exactly like the squirming yellow villains. The local monkeys really liked the grubs, as did our tour guide.
He cites an article published last year by two Dutch researchers who argued that insects are nutritious, low-fat and eco-smart, using far less water and food than warm-blooded livestock.
Insects are traditional fare in much of Africa, Asia and Latin America. In Thailand’s open-air markets, for example, you can pick out what you’d like to try and have it cooked up right there — fast food to go. Ancient Romans considered beetle larvae a treat.
Then there was Oaxaca, where my new Mexican friend insisted I try the chapulines, aka grasshoppers, that were omnipresent at the local markets. They eat them fried, and covered in various spices (salt, garlic, or a local hot spice, among others). There was no way in hell I was going to eat a grasshopper, fried or otherwise. You can watch the preparation of fried Oaxacan chapulines here. Let's just say that that was a word I wasn't going to quickly forget.
